Diego’s father, Kenny Lemos pulls a red wagon full of the family’s living supplies to take out to their car on Diego’s last day at Children’s Hospital. The family prepared to return home after spending two months living at both Swedish and Children’s hospitals, staying with Diego as he slowly recovered from a series of surgeries including many skin grafts and the amputation of his left leg several inches below the knee. <strong> <a href="http://photos.denverpost.com/mediacenter/category/special-projects/diego-lemos/" target="_blank">Videos and Photos</a></strong>

About a block away, Hugo Carrazco’s pickup pointed west on the frontage road. He saw something flapping beneath a school bus headed toward him.

At first glance, he thought it might be a plastic trash bag caught in the rear wheels. Then he saw a boy running alongside, waving, trying to get the driver’s attention.

That’s when he realized why the boy was so frantic: Someone was being dragged along the pavement, wedged against rear tires that had ripped off clothing that now windmilled with every rotation.

Carrazco saw the bus stop. Then he watched the driver get out, check on the kid lying in the street, get back in and back up a few feet. By this time, Carrazco was running toward the bus. He took off his sweater and folded it beneath the boy’s head. He asked him if he knew his parents’ phone number.

Diego told him his father’s cell number. Carrazco made the call.

“Does it look bad?” Diego wanted to know.

“I don’t know. I cannot see your legs.”

“Am I going to die?”

The words broke Carrazco’s heart. He told Diego he’d be OK, to stay strong, help was on the way.

“I remember he was very polite to me,” Carrazco recalls. “When I told him everything’s going to be fine, he said, ‘Yes, yes, thank you, sir.’ “

Afterward, when Carrazco phoned his wife to relate what he had just seen, “a couple of tears came out of me.”

Tammy Petersen, who had given Diego the sugar just a short while earlier, heard a scream and also sprinted to the accident scene.

Her 17-year-old daughter, Tiffany Thomas, escorted a frantic Julian to their townhome, where he called his mother. For a while, he wouldn’t go back outside because, he said, he didn’t want to see his brother dead.

Kenny Lemos sped to the intersection and saw what seemed like the whole neighborhood gathered by the service road and South Depew.

“What does it look like, Daddy?” Diego asked when he saw his father. “Am I going to be OK?”

“Yes,” Kenny replied.

But as the severity of what happened began to sink in, Kenny started to cry. A firefighter pulled him aside.

“Don’t lose it,” he said. “He needs you to be calm.”

After Tina got the phone call from Julian, her horrified expression prompted a co-worker to come to her aid and drive her to the accident scene. The 10-minute ride seemed like forever. Tina cried so hard, her whole body shook. Her co-worker tried to reassure her, reminding Tina that if Diego saw her freaked out, he might freak out too.

When she arrived, a police officer repeated that advice. Then she saw Kenny.

“Tina, it’s not good,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

She could see Diego gazing in her direction, seemingly calm. She already was thanking God that nothing serious appeared to be wrong with him.

Emergency workers allowed her to approach Diego.

“Is it bad, Mom?” he asked her.

“No, ‘jito,” she said, using an affectionate Spanish word for son. “You’re going to be fine.”

“Am I going to die?”

“You’re going to be fine. Just do everything that they tell you to do, OK?”

By now, Diego’s injured body had been covered by a blanket. Tina couldn’t see the worst of it.

She accompanied Diego on the ambulance ride and listened as he chatted with the paramedic “like nothing was wrong, like he wasn’t in pain or crying, just answering questions.

“They were talking about football.”

Kenny Lemos played football at Denver West High School, where a late growth spurt helped him develop a solid physique that he used to anchor the offensive and defensive lines. And though he would eventually gravitate to boxing, he continued to love the game with a passion that transferred to his older son.

He was 20 when a relationship with a high school girlfriend led to Diego’s birth in 1998. Kenny and the mother never married, and after a bitter legal dispute, he gained custody of Diego when the boy was 3.

From the beginning, Kenny sought to instill a mental toughness in his son. He understood little about being a father — he never knew his own dad — and approached Diego’s upbringing more like a big brother.

“My whole thing was, ‘You better be tough,’ ” Kenny says. “This was my way of not having to worry when I wasn’t around him.”

Ever since he could walk, Diego loved nothing so much as watching the Denver Broncos play — unless he was playing himself. He started organized football at age 7 in the Police Athletic League.

Kenny remembers that the first year Diego played tackle football, the coach asked how he had taught his son to be so aggressive. The other kids gave him a nickname: “Nightmare Lemos.”

“There’d be times he’d hit people on the field, then get up and scream,” Kenny says. “I asked him why, and he said, ‘I don’t scream, Daddy.’ He didn’t even realize; he just turns into a different person. But off the field, he’s the kindest kid.”

Tina Montoya also attended West, but she and Kenny weren’t friends until after high school, when relatives hooked them up. It took Kenny a few months to call Tina.

When she called him back, he was getting ready for an amateur fight at the Stockyards Arena — literally wrapping his hands for the heavyweight bout when his phone rang.

He knocked out his opponent in the first round. A little more than a year later, in August 2002, he and Tina got married.

Tina was pregnant with JuJu, as the family calls Julian, when Kenny got custody of Diego. They all bonded while she took maternity leave, and it was only a matter of months before Diego began referring to Tina as “Mom.” Together with Makayla Montoya, Tina’s now-14-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, they blended into a family.

Prior to the accident, though, the marriage had hit a rough patch. Kenny moved to a nearby apartment while the couple sorts things out.

Kevin Simpson has covered a wide variety of topics at The Denver Post while working as a sports writer, metro columnist and general assignment reporter with a focus on long-form pieces. A graduate of the University of Missouri, he arrived in Colorado in 1979 and spent five years covering sports at the Rocky Mountain News before joining The Post.

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